5 Better Ways to Spend Money Than on a FutureGen Clean-Coal Plant

Yes, FutureGen, the $1 billion Bush-era clean-coal project, is back from the dead as FutureGen 2.0. New name, same goal: to make a zero-emissions coal plant. The problem is, there's no such thing as truly clean coal power. Here are 5 better, more efficient ways to invest money in clean energy.

For a long time, FutureGen seemed destined to go down in history as just another one of the George W. Bush administration's dead-end environmental ventures. The initial FutureGen plan, formulated in the early 2000s, called for building a 275-megawatt clean-coal plant near Mattoon, Ill.‚ "clean" because the carbon dioxide it generated would be captured and put into underground storage.

The Bush administration withdrew funding for the project as cost estimates climbed, but this month the Department of Energy announced plans to resume FutureGen in a revised form. Instead of building a coal plant in Mattoon, department officials have proposed retrofitting an existing 200-Mw plant in Meredosia, Ill., at a cost of a little over $1 billion. The plant renovation would involve outfitting the plant for oxy-combustion‚ a process in which coal is burned in a high-oxygen environment instead of air, eliminating some toxic emissions and making it easier to capture the CO2 that's generated.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

The big problem with the so-called FutureGen 2.0 project, though, is that there's no such thing as truly clean coal power. Even when CO2 from coal powerplants is sequestered (a pricey process that may not be a permanent solution), the coal used to power the plants still has to be mined. This dirty business destroys landscapes, wildlife habitats and soils; pollutes the air with methane, a potent greenhouse gas; and afflicts miners with black-lung disease. Here are five promising technologies we could fund instead to get a better environmental bang for our buck.

Most Popular

• Cogeneration. Drawing heat and power from the same plant is not a new idea, but it's an environmentally and economically sound one that makes sense because generating electricity tends to yield heat as a byproduct. Best of all, cogeneration plants can be powered with renewable fuels like biomass. Canadian firm Nova Scotia Power, for instance, is designing a 60-Mw combined heat and power plant that will run on biomass and will cost $200 million to construct. Based on this estimate, five cogeneration plants could be built for about the same cost as the revamped FutureGen plant‚ and combined, the plants would generate 50 percent more power.

• Nuclear. Sure, the specter of Chernobyl still looms. But the newest generation of nuclear plants are almost meltdown-proof, unlike their 1980s Russian counterparts, and most of the radioactive waste they generate is securely stored in concrete pools lined with steel. While new plants require substantial capital investment, they're still a better deal than FutureGen. Two 1350-Mw plants, for example, are currently being planned in South Texas for $10 billion. That breaks down to about $3.7 million per Mw‚ less than the approximately $5 million per-Mw cost FutureGen 2.0 would incur.

• Solar. Non-polluting? Check. Plentiful? Check. The beef with solar has always been that it's pricier than other environmentally friendly power options, but with the advent of more efficient solar cells and less expensive materials, that's starting to change. A 75-Mw plant in Charlotte County, Fla., set to power a cluster of homes dubbed "the first solar city" will cost about $350 million, yielding a per-Mw cost less than that of FutureGen 2.0.

• Wind. Few want wind turbines in their own backyard, but there are plenty of uninhabited areas across the country where turbines can spin unseen and generate massive amounts of pollution-free electricity. Terra-Gen Power just broke ground on a $3.6 billion turbine field in California's Mojave Desert that will produce 1550 Mw of power when it's finished in 2015. If this rough estimate holds, the project will cost only $2.3 million per Mw, less than half of FutureGen 2.0's per-Mw tab (though the Terra-Gen field will operate at about 30 percent to 40 percent capacity because of natural variations in wind speed).

• Tidal power. Unless the Earth ceases to rotate in the gravitational fields of the sun and moon, creating the ocean perturbations that drive tides, the churn of tidal waves will remain one of the most dependable energy sources we can harness. And arrays of tidal turbines can be surprisingly affordable, too. The Sihwa Lake tidal powerplant near Seoul, South Korea, due to be completed this year, will generate 254 Mw of power and cost about $355 million to build‚ an approximate per-Mw cost of only $1.4 million.